William Ralph Wright was born on January 20, 1960. He is an American video game designer and co-founded the game development company Maxis, which later became part of Electronic Arts. In April 2009, he left Electronic Arts to lead Stupid Fun Club Camp, an entertainment think tank. Wright and Electronic Arts are the main owners of this company.

The first computer game Wright designed was Raid on Bungeling Bay, released in 1984. However, SimCity was the game that made him famous. Maxis, the company Wright co-founded with Jeff Braun, published SimCity. Wright continued to create games based on simulation themes, including SimEarth and SimAnt.

Wright has received many awards for his work in game design. He is best known for creating The Sims series. Maxis developed the first game in the series in 2000. The series led to many follow-up games, including The Sims 2, The Sims 3, The Sims 4, and their expansion packs. His most recent game, Spore, was released in September 2008. It features gameplay based on the idea of evolution and scientific progress. The game sold 406,000 copies within three weeks of its release.

In 2007, Wright became the first game designer to receive the BAFTA Fellowship. This award had previously only been given to people in the film and television industries.

Early life and education

Wright was born on January 20, 1960, in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the son of a plastics engineer and an actress. He attended a Montessori school until he was nine years old. In the same year, his father passed away from leukemia, and Wright moved with his mother and younger sister to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He graduated from Baton Rouge Episcopal High School when he was 16 years old.

Wright became interested in game design during childhood through the Chinese strategy board game Go. He once said that Go has "a simple set of rules" but "the strategies in it are so complex" and that he was "fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity." As a teenager, he enjoyed playing board wargames like PanzerBlitz.

After high school, Wright studied architecture at Louisiana State University for two years. He then transferred to Louisiana Tech University, where he changed his major to mechanical engineering. He was especially interested in robotics, space exploration, military history, and language arts. Two years later, in the fall of 1980, he transferred again to The New School in New York City. During this time, he lived in an apartment in Greenwich Village and spent his free time "searching for spare parts in local electronics surplus stores."

While in New York City, he bought an Apple II+ computer and taught himself Applesoft BASIC, Pascal, and assembly language to create Conway's Game of Life. After one year at The New School, Wright completed five years of college courses without earning a degree and returned to Baton Rouge.

Career

While other game designers, such as Bill Budge and Nasir Gebelli, were creating games for Apple computers, Wright chose to develop games for the newer Commodore 64. His first game was the helicopter action game Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984). In this game, the player flies over islands and drops bombs to complete missions.

Wright found that he enjoyed creating the islands in Raid on Bungeling Bay more than playing the game itself. This experience inspired him to make a new game, which eventually became SimCity. However, Wright struggled to find a publisher for the game. The design of SimCity was influenced by the work of two architects and urban theorists, Christopher Alexander and Jay Forrester.

Wright has always been interested in the process of designing and the strategies used in creation. Christopher Alexander, in his book A Pattern Language, described how spatial relationships can be organized into a system for designing. Wright wanted to create a similar system for designing complex systems and provide tools for others to use.

In an interview with The Times, Wright said that computers help people expand their imagination. He introduced the idea of a "metabrain," explaining that any system that uses the intelligence of many people is a metabrain. He noted that technology reduces the difficulty of connecting people’s ideas, allowing computers to collect and share information in ways that were not possible before. He used Spore as an example, where players create content, and computers decide how to share it. Wright believed that these games explore the creativity of millions of people working together.

In 1986, Wright met Jeff Braun, an investor interested in the computer game industry, at what Wright called "the world's most important pizza party." Together, they founded Maxis in Orinda, California, in 1987. SimCity (1989) became a major success and is considered one of the most influential computer games ever made. Wright was frequently featured in computer magazines, including PC Gamer, which listed him in its "Game Gods" section with other notable game designers.

After SimCity’s success, Wright created SimEarth (1990) and SimAnt (1991). He co-designed SimCity 2000 (1993) with Fred Haslam, and Maxis continued to make other "Sim" games. Wright’s next game was SimCopter (1996). Although these games were not as popular as SimCity, they helped build Wright’s reputation as a designer of "software toys"—games that do not have a clear win or loss but can be played for long periods. In 1992, Wright moved to Walnut Creek, California.

Wright is known for his interest in complex adaptive systems. Many of his games, such as SimAnt, SimEarth, and SimCity, were inspired by books about these systems, including The Ants by E.O. Wilson, Gaia Theory by James Lovelock, and Urban Dynamics by Jay Forrester. Wright’s goal in game design is to give players "possibility spaces," or simple rules that combine with game elements to create complex designs. All games he helped design follow these principles.

Maxis became a public company in 1995, with revenue of $38 million. The company’s stock price reached $50 per share before falling due to financial losses. In 1997, Electronic Arts (EA) purchased Maxis.

After losing his home in a fire in 1991, Wright was inspired to create a game about rebuilding his life. He began designing a virtual dollhouse, similar to SimCity, but focused on individual people. This idea evolved into The Sims, which was based on Wright’s experience of rebuilding and furnishing his home. The game was originally called Home Tactics but changed direction after suggestions to rate homes based on quality of life for virtual residents. Themes like home construction and landscaping are common in the game.

Maxis was not interested in The Sims, but EA, impressed by Wright’s work on SimCity, agreed to publish it. The Sims was released in February 2000 and became Wright’s most successful game. It eventually surpassed Myst as the best-selling computer game of all time and led to many expansions and spin-offs. Wright also created a multiplayer version called The Sims Online, which was less popular. By 2006, the Sims franchise had earned EA over a billion dollars.

At the Game Developers Conference in 2005, Wright announced Spore, a game that demonstrated ways to reduce the amount of content developers need to create. He hoped to encourage others to take creative risks in game design.

Wright has said that he enjoys creating things, starting with models as a child and later using computers to make dynamic models and behaviors. He believes games should give players tools to create and explore, placing them in the role of a designer. He wants players to feel that their creations matter and that the game world reacts to their choices. He believes that games with large solution spaces—where players can solve problems in many different ways—help players feel more connected to their creations.

Wright believes that simulations, as games, can improve education by teaching children to learn through experimentation and failure. He argues that schools should focus on teaching skills like trial and error and problem-solving, which games naturally encourage. As the world becomes more complex, he thinks these skills will become even more important.

Personal life

Wright lives in Oakland, California. He does not believe in any religion. In 1984, he married artist Joell Jones, and they had a child named Cassidy in 1986. The family lost their home and most records of Wright's early career during the Oakland firestorm of 1991. Wright and Jones separated in 2008. He has since married Anya Zavarzina.

Wright is a member of the board of trustees for the X Prize Foundation, a non-profit organization that creates and hosts public competitions to encourage technological progress that helps people. During the 2008 United States presidential election, Wright donated money to the campaigns of Rudy Giuliani and later John McCain.

In 1980, Wright and co-driver Rick Doherty participated in the U.S. Express, a cross-country race that followed The Cannonball Run. Wright and Doherty drove a specially modified Mazda RX-7 from Brooklyn, New York, to Santa Monica, California, in 33 hours and 39 minutes, winning the illegal race. Wright competed in the race only once, and it continued until 1983.

Wright collects items from the Soviet space program in his spare time. These items include a 100-pound (45 kg) hatch from a space shuttle, a seat from a Soyuz spacecraft, control panels from the Mir space station, and the control console of the Soyuz 23, as well as dolls, dice, and fossils.

Wright once built competitive robots for BattleBots with his daughter but no longer does. As of November 2006, Wright still had leftover pieces of machined metal from his BattleBots projects scattered in his garage. After his work in BattleBots, Wright has explored the field of human-robot interactions:

"We build these robots and take them to Berkeley to study how people interact with them. We created a newer robot with a rapid-fire pingpong cannon that shoots about 10 balls per second. We give people a plastic bat and tell them, 'It’s set up to play baseball. Do you want to play baseball? It will shoot a little ball, and you try to hit it.' Suddenly, the robot starts shooting balls rapidly, and people are surprised."

Wright was a former Robot Wars champion in the Stupid Fun Club, a robotics workshop in Berkeley. One of his robots, "Kitty Puff Puff," designed with the help of his daughter Cassidy, fought opponents by attaching a roll of tape to its armature and circling them to trap them. This technique, called "cocooning," was eventually banned.